Managing a Workshop Assignment

A Workshop Assignment is more complex than an ordinary assignment.
It involves a number of steps or phases. These are

Set Up Assignment The assessment of the assignment
should be broken into a number of assessment ELEMENTS. This makes
the grading of an assignment less arbitrary and gives the students a
framework on which to make assessments. The teacher has the role of
setting up the assessment elements thus making a grading sheet. (See
that page for more details.)

With the assessment elements set up the teacher will normally submit a
small number of example pieces of work. These are practice pieces for the
students to assess before preparing their own pieces of work. However,
before the assignment is made available to students, these example
pieces should be assessed by the teacher. This provides the teacher
with specimen "answers" when reviewing the students' assessments
of those examples (produced in the next phase).

The submission of example pieces of work by the teacher is optional
and for certain assignments may not be appropriate.

Allow Student Submissions The assignment is now opened
to the students. If the teacher has set up example pieces of work, the students
are required to assess a specified number of these. (The number of
assessments is given when the assignment is created.) Once a student has
made the required number of assessments they can then submit their own
work. In the case of an assignment with no examples, the students are free
to submit their own work without any delay.

The advantage of leaving the assignment in the Submission phase is to allow
a build up of submissions. When they are subsequently allocated, in the next
two phases, there is better distribution of work. If the assignment is put
straight into the "Allow Submissions and Assessments" phase from
the "Set Up" phase (which is allowed) students who submit early
will tend to have early submissions to assess and those students who submit
late will tend to have late submissions to assess. Adding a "delay"
before peer assessment starts will alleviate that problem to a large extent.

When a student submits a piece of work the teacher can, if desired, assess that
work. This assessment can be incorporated into the student's final grade. These
assessments can take place in the submission and assessment phases of the
assignment.

Allow Student Submissions and Assessments If the assignment includes
peer assessment, students who have submitted work are now shown other students'
work to assess. Students who have not yet submitted work are allowed to submit
their work (but they are not shown other students' work to access).
In this phase, submissions, re-submissions and assessments of submissions
and re-submissions are allowed to take place together.

The teacher may want to split the submission of work and its peer assessment
into two distinct phases, waiting for all students to submit their work before
going into the peer assessment phase. In that case this phase is not used at all,
the assignment goes from "Allow Submissions" straight to "Allow
Assessments". This allows the teacher to place a deadline on submissions,
the assignment is moved into the "Allow Assessments" phase at that
deadline.

If the teacher, on the other hand, does not want such as clear cut division in
the assignment, then the assignment uses this phase. When allowing submissions
and assessments to occur together, the teacher should consider setting the
Over Allocation Level to ONE (or possibly TWO) to allow the allocations
to go smoothly (see the help page on that option for more details). Note
that doing this will result in some submissions being (peer) assessed more
times and some less times than the majority of the submissions.

When a student has made an assessment their peer can see that assessment. The
student who submitted the work can comment on the assessment if that option
was chosen for the assignment.

Allow Student Assessments In this phase peer assessments continue but
students are not allowed to make any submissions, that includes re-submissions.
Students who have not made a submission are told that submissions are no longer
allowed and they are not shown any (peer) submissions to assess.

Display of Final Grades The final phase of the assignment is entered
to allow the students to see their final grades in detail. The individual
assessments which contribute to the final grade of each submission can be
easily reviewed.

The students (and the teacher) are shown an optional "League Table"
of the student submissions. These are listed in order of grade, the top submission
is first.

At any phase of the assignment the teacher can open the
"Administration" page. This shows the current state of the
assignment. It lists the Teacher's example submissions (if any), the
students' assessments (of the teacher's examples, their own work, and of
other students' submissions), and the submissions of the students. The
teacher can use this page to assess and re-assess submissions, delete
submissions and assessments, and generally watch the progress of the
assignment.